Its time for movies to be honest about our relationships  with our phones

Despite the fact that so much of our communication now happens online, TV and film have traditionally done a bad job of translating our texts, emails, and DMs to the screen. There are a lot of good reasons why: text communication doesnt have the inherent drama of face-to-face dialogue. It dates itself quickly. And, as Tony Zhou pointed out in his video A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film on Vimeo, dedicating precious screen time to depicting, well, another screen, can be counterintuitive and expensive. Text-based conversations on-screen often end up feeling awkward and unnatural, with geriatrically large text to let us read over a characters shoulder, off-brand emoji floating in midair, or, worst of all, characters that…